- Set up a Cine Camera Actor and explain what focal length does to a landscape.
- Author a camera move in Sequencer with deliberate easing, and say why abrupt motion destroys legibility.
- Render a finished clip through Movie Render Queue rather than screen-capturing the viewport.
10:00 · Brief The camera is the argument
A flyover is not a tour. Every choice you make about where the camera goes is a claim about what matters in this place — and the most common failure is a camera that moves like a drone operator showing off rather than like someone looking at something.
Why "no sudden turns" is a rule and not a preference
A viewer reads a landscape by tracking features. Give them a smooth, slow move and they build a mental model of the terrain: this ridge is behind that valley, the river runs that way. Snap the camera and the model collapses — they spend the next two seconds re-orienting instead of looking. Rapid movement in a wide landscape reads as noise.
So the discipline for Project 1 is: long moves, gentle easing, and changes of direction that a body could survive. If your flyover would make a passenger reach for the armrest, it is not finished.
Focal length is a claim about distance
A wide lens exaggerates depth and makes space feel vast and traversable. A long lens compresses it, stacking ridges into flat layers and making distance feel unreachable. Neither is correct — but they say different things about the same terrain, and choosing without knowing that is leaving the argument to chance.
Bring your observation from Week 1. Both works treat the earth as material rather than as backdrop, and both are made from the kind of data you are now streaming. What does each one do with the camera that a mapping application would never do?
10:45 · Guided lab Build one move, properly
We author a single ninety-second move together on the class site, then you do the same on yours.
- Add a Cine Camera Actor
Not a standard camera. The cine camera gives you real focal length, aperture and focus, and the filmback settings that make its framing predictable.
- Create a Level Sequence and add the camera
Open Sequencer, add your camera, and set the sequence length to 90 seconds at your project frame rate. Working to the real duration from the start stops you from making a lovely twelve-second move you then cannot extend.
- Key the move — few keys, far apart
Three or four camera positions across ninety seconds, not thirty. Fewer keys means smoother motion and far less to fix.
- Ease everything
In the curve editor, soften the interpolation at every key. A camera that arrives and departs gently reads as intentional; linear motion reads as machinery.
- Watch it at full length, twice
Not scrubbed — played, start to finish, without touching anything. Most camera problems are only visible in real time, and ninety seconds is long enough to be boring if the move has no shape.
- Render through Movie Render Queue
Not a viewport capture. Movie Render Queue gives you proper anti-aliasing and lets the streamed tiles finish loading before each frame is written — which is the difference between crisp terrain and a blurry mess.
- Encode with FFMPEG
For a high-quality deliverable, render an image sequence and encode it. Set this up now rather than the night before crit.
Streamed tiles load progressively, so a fast camera outruns the data and renders blurry or missing geometry. If your flyover pops and smears, the fix is usually a slower move — which is the same fix the legibility rule already asked for.
12:00 · Workbench Practice, unhurried
No new material. You work on your own file while I circulate — this is the hour where the technique from the guided lab stops being something you watched and becomes something you can do.
- Author your own ninety seconds
On your site, at full duration. Get a rough version end to end before polishing any part of it.
- If you fell behind, catch up here
Still fighting the API key or the tiles? Say so now — Project 1 is due at next week's crit and this is the hour to fix it.
- If you are ahead, go deeper
Try a second version with a different focal length and compare what each says about the place. Bring both to crit.
- Ask the AI TA anything
Open all term for questions about how and why. It explains; you build. No agents in the work until Week 9.
- A Level Sequence exactly ninety seconds long, with a Cine Camera Actor.
- Four keys or fewer, all eased, no abrupt changes of direction.
- One full-length playback watched without touching the timeline.
- A test render through Movie Render Queue — not a viewport capture.
1:15 · Crit / share Rough cuts
Screens up with whatever you have, unfinished. We watch each other's moves for legibility rather than polish: can you describe the terrain after one viewing? Did you ever lose your bearings, and where exactly? That timestamp is the note.
Homework — due at the Week 3 crit
| Task | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Finish and render the ninety-second flyover, eased and legible throughout. | Rendered video delivered per the brief, due at the W3 crit. |
| Document your site coordinates and every data source you streamed, with its attribution. | A short data note in your project folder — this is graded as part of P1. |
Resources
- Cinematics and Sequencer — cameras, tracks and the curve editor.
- Movie Render Queue — the correct way to output a finished clip.
- William Faucher — practical Unreal cinematography; his lighting and camera videos are the best free resource in this area.